The Retreat to Moral Certainty

The bastion of moral certainty always represents a retreat from freedom and personal responsibility into the fortress of submission, deference, conformity, blind obedience and unanimity of conscience. And, make no mistake, it is God who demands freedom without which individual salvation is meaningless and moot. Try to tell that to some people.

Mike Pence's morality, for example, came to him wholesale and obliterated doubt. He is saved and we are suspect. Since his salvation is assured he concerns himself with ours, not that it matters since we are probably predestined for perdition anyway, but he would like to inhabit a nicer ethical 'hood while he's trapped it the shithole of creation, evidently.

His soul is impatient for the release of death and a reunion with God, which his beliefs tell him is certain. Call me stodgy and a stickler but I find this presumptuous. Pence, Jimmy Swaggart, Falwell, Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Roy Moore, Tom DeLay and the other peddlers of righteousness think they know the mind of God. I am somewhat dubious.

I concern myself first with my own morality and assume no certainty. I judge actions, not individuals. I have glimpsed the transformation of the love of God, I would say, and it was marked most forcefully by humility and a perspective that precluded judging anybody. Judgement itself didn't exist in that sphere, only love. Nothing else made sense there.

Pence is loving him some immigrants lately with deportations. He's loving other groups with condemnations for circumstantial faults. His contempt overflows, visibly in his ethically wracked countenance. Either that or he has digestive issues. I think that the transformation resides not within him, but who am I to say. If it does maybe it's messing with his bowels.